Infer what you wish. I’ve tried to answer your questions earnestly.
Dude, you’re really missing the point here.
You (a single entity with one point of view - your own consciousness) goes to sleep.
In the morning two yous (two entities, with two diverging points of view) wake up.
You, in a very real sense, are IN BOTH ROOMS.
Each of you experiences the following: I went to sleep, I woke up.
The only difference is that each “you” woke up in a different room. If the two of you were kept totally away from each other for the rest of time, you would each never know that there was another you wandering around with a totally valid claim to you-hood.
There is no way to indicate which of you is the original, and which is the copy. If you really HAVE to know, then the two of you could meet up in the hallway and agree to flip a coin as to which of you is “real” but it’s just a show - you BOTH are YOU, from your own (now two individual, but totally logical and normal viewpoints)
You’re starting from a premise that’s flawed: *There can be only **one *me.
So you’re arguing that one of the two has to be not-you. That’s not the way it works. The way it works is that your premise has to change: *There can be **multiple *mes, and now we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it.
Nothing hard, just right now you’re arguing from a place that won’t let the right answer work.
The short answer - YOU, from your perspective, will wake up in room 1. YOU, from your perspective, will ALSO wake up in room 2. Neither YOU will know anything about the other until you meet, or are told about the doubling.
Suppose I don’t fall asleep through the experiment and stay up all along in room 1, while my exact copy is being assembled in room 2. In this case I can be absolutely sure that after the experiment I will remain in room 1. No one would be able to convince me that I will be in BOTH.
So why should it be drastically different if I fell asleep during the experiment and then woke up in the end?
Why my falling asleep renders the question flawed?
Because the only thing that makes you certain that you’re YOU is perceived continuity of experience.
But we don’t really HAVE continuity of experience.
We all fall asleep, go unconscious for surgery or through fainting, have memory lapses (ever experienced road fog - suddenly you “wake up” out of whatever daydream or thinking you were doing to realize you don’t remember anything about the last few minutes you were driving) or just zone out. We forget things. We cobble together a through-line to our lives to make it seem coherent and point-by-point, but it really isn’t.
If you are awake through this procedure, all you establish is that you are the original, and that the other is your double. However, even memories are unstable. It’s been proven in several experiments that people can be primed to remember things differently from how they actually happened. Over time, that memory could be erased or changed so you didn’t remember it correctly. At that point, if you’re just relying on continuity of experience, you’re back to where you were before - trying desperately to prove that one or the other YOU is really YOU, when in reality, both have equal and valid claims to you-ness as based on past memories, and current physiciality and mindset.
I still hold that even in a circumstance where you know at the time which person is the original, the double would still be just as much “you” as the original is.
Falling asleep (or not) makes no difference, really. Staying awake means the original receives a little more persuasion that he’s the real deal and the other guy is just a copy, but the copy wakes up, and is you, just like when you woke up this morning.
So from your point of view, you’re you because you stayed awake; but from his point of view, he’s you, and he just woke up. So what?
But IF IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE then the question of which room I would wake up should be just as reasonable even in case I fall asleep.
This is only valid if based on a HUGE assumption that personality only exists while staying awake and every morning after waking up you are not really you, but another person that just happen to have the same set of memories!
Do you really think so?
Yes It’s just as reasonable. The only thing that makes difficult the question “which room will I wake up in” is the highly unusual scenario that my currently-singular life narrative diverges into two threads.
That’s how things appear to work - and assuming things are the way they appear to be is not huge assumption. Got a better explanation of what we are?
If you falling asleep (or being disintegrated and reassembled) doesn’t make much difference, why did you include that in your hypothetical? This is a genuine question by the way, I have been wondering why you chose to (IMHO) needlessly complicate things with this disintegration business.
If we go back to my twin scenario it may help you understand other people’s reasoning here. Say we’ve got a mommy and daddy who love each other very much, yadda yadda yadda, and a zygote forms. Let’s call it Ziggy the Zygote. As sometimes happens, Ziggy splits in two and forms two embryos – identical twins. Nine months later they are born. The parents name the twin delivered first “Anne” and the twin delivered second “Beth”.
Knowing that the parents plan to name their babies alphabetically, can we predict what name Ziggy the Zygote will ultimately be given? Will Ziggy be the firstborn or the secondborn twin?
The statements “Ziggy is Anne” and “Ziggy is Beth” are both equally correct. Ziggy developed into Anne, and Ziggy also developed into Beth. Neither is more or less Ziggy than the other. This does not mean that Anne and Beth share the same mind or anything, they are two different people who once happened to be a single entity. Since people can’t remember all the way back to conception then the twins will have no memory of the time when they were both the same entity, but that’s still what happened.
Getting back to your scenario, I personally would not say that an exact duplicate of me is me because there can only be one “me” from my own perspective. The instant my duplicate becomes self-aware she’ll be her own “me”, the same as anyone else. But this is perhaps a distinction without a difference. If I’m duplicated tomorrow and you asked each of these identical-looking women “Who were you yesterday?” then the answer would be the same for both. They will both have been the same person who is “me” today, just like the twins Anne and Beth were once the same zygote.
That’s how things appear to work - and assuming things are the way they appear to be is not huge assumption. Got a better explanation of what we are?
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I’m going to retract my response above, only because:
[ul]
[li]I’m not arguing that personality only exists while awake. Sleep just happens to have featured in this discussion as a detail.[/li][li]I’m not claiming that anyone is ‘not really you’.[/li][/ul]
But the sentiment still stands. What we appear to be is: organisms that remember their previous experiences, and from this, construct a sense of continuous self.
It seems like you’re saying that the internal viewpoint has access to something that cannot be measured, quantified or described by an external observer. If that’s the case, the question at hand is moot, because duplication would be impossible.
In the one-sleeps scenario;
The individual staying awake is convinced he’s the real you, because he remembers being awake from moment to moment; he cries “I’m the real one! - that other guy is obviously the copy”
The copy is convinced he’s the real you, because he remembers being you the day before; he cries “I don’t know what you did, but I’m in this body now - that other guy merely used to be me”
In both cases, there is a continuation of the process that creates the phenomenon known as ‘you’ - it’s just happening in two places; the only thing the staying-awake guy has over the other one is his memory of having stayed awake. If that’s the crucial difference between ‘the real me’ and ‘just a copy’, then I think you have to concede that you’re today just a person that remembers being you yesterday (assuming you slept last night)